Jamison

cara, rocky horror, and i ride in the bed of one of the pickups with three others, as well as tubes and fuel equipment that reek of gasoline. The Nomads had already hit the first two gas stations we passed and said there was nothing there. We stop at the third, but it’s also empty.

One of the Nomads shrugs. “Maybe a lot of Florida folks were trying to get out and go somewhere they weren’t stockpilin’ the supplies.”

We continue driving, passing dust-covered cars pulled to the side of the road. Some people were nice enough to write “NO FUEL” in the dust.

I remember the time Andrew and I found a blue Civic that ran for three whole hours before the fuel ran out. It was beautiful. The day was hot and humid, but feeling the wind blowing around us while driving down a silent, empty highway was incredible. Now, the wind blowing around us in the back of the truck is a little chilly. It’s winter, which means the days in Florida are in the low-to-mid sixties. We’ll need to stop to get jackets and winter clothes soon if we keep going north to Maryland.

After another hour, Cal pulls into a small three-pump gas station. They peel off the bottle-cap-looking metal plates in the station lot and send one of the tubes down until it meets resistance.

Rocky Horror—having learned how the pump worked at the last stop—hooks up the hand pump while another Nomad puts a second tube coming out of the hand pump into a five-gallon gas can.

We listen, at first hearing only the wind whistling through the tube in the can.

Then what sounds like bubbling.

“We mighta got some here, boss,” one of the guys says. And soon the gurgles grow louder and the sound of fuel splashes into the metal canister. We cheer, and even Cara looks excited.

“Okay,” Cal says, pointing to Cara, Rocky Horror, and one of the Nomad men. “You three, stay here, fill up as many tanks as you can. Make sure the truck gets some, too.”

Then he points at me and two other Nomads. “You three are with me; let’s head into that town about a mile down the road and see what we can find.”

We nod and I go back to the truck to grab Andrew’s and my packs, as well as Rocky Horror’s and Cara’s.

“Once it’s empty or the cans are full, come find us,” Cal says.

And we head down the road on foot.

The town is Grand Lemfort, Florida, and the rusted and dusty sign welcoming us on the side of the road says it’s home to the oldest living person in the Florida panhandle. Which—judging by the age of the sign—may not have been true even when the superflu hit.

There are no houses or buildings, but dead palm fronds rustle across the road, fallen from the trees on either side. Farther down, something moves, crossing from one side to the other. It’s a gray fox. A skinny one that gives us a quick glance, then runs off into the overgrown grass on the left side of the road.

After about a half mile, we come to what looks like quaint downtown Grand Lemfort. There’s a public library, a “multiuse” center that looks like a sad little empty storefront, and something called GF Supermarket, where the word supermarket is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

It’s a one-story peeling white shiplap building a little larger than the library, which itself looks no bigger than four rooms. The front door to GF is dusty and unbroken, but around it—at about knee height—are scratch marks in the peeling paint. Probably the fox. If it was pawing around the door, maybe there’s food in there.

“How about over there?” I ask Cal. He nods and we walk over. The doors are locked. “Maybe a back entrance?” I try.

But Cal takes the rifle off his shoulder and uses the butt to smash open the glass. He reaches through and unlocks the door.

The grocery store is warm and musty, and smells a bit rotten. The shelves are pretty empty but some still have items on them.

“Check the dry goods,” Cal tells the others, then he turns to me. “Let’s check out the canned stuff and also see if there’s any more med supplies.”

I go up an aisle with canned food, but most of the cans on the shelves have exploded, their contents splattered across the ceiling or spilling down the shelf and dried out. The ones that haven’t exploded are bulging.

Cal nods, picking up a seemingly fine can, but its bottom sticks to the shelf, and whatever was inside has turned to a putrid brown sludge. “This was the issue in some of the desert states, too. Without AC, this place probably gets to around a hundred by noon. Canned stuff spoils and explodes.”

“Have you thought about heading north?” I ask. I’m sure there are still plenty of places there that didn’t get so hot inside. At least I hope there are.

“We were thinking of heading that way next. You’re all from the Keys, so it’s not like there’d be anything down there for us to find.”

We move over to the medical section and grab boxes of gauze, antibiotic ointment, painkillers, and bandages. There are also several bottles of multivitamins and chewable kids’ vitamins—all the gummy vitamins have melted into one large blob at the bottom of the plastic bottle.

“Yeah,” I say, trying to avoid talking too much about the Keys. “And I heard a bit about your last settlement. I’m sorry.” Andrew told me what happened with them, but he said he didn’t think he had the whole story. He also reminded me to be careful with what I said about the Keys around the Nomads. We don’t need any more people trying to turn us over to Fort Caroline.

Cal doesn’t say anything as he stares at the almost-empty fridges lining the wall. The milk section is empty—thankfully. I’m not sure I’d want to smell rotten, exploded milk. But some of the soft drinks and cheeses are still there. The cheeses are a beautiful shade of fuzzy blue green.

“Let’s check if there’s a basement,” he says, nodding to the back of the store. I follow him as he calls out to the others, “How’s it going over there?”

“Got some pasta that’s not ruined,” says a woman whose name I haven’t gotten yet. “And there’s some nuts and cookies.”

Cal pushes the back door open, and I take the flashlight from my bag. It’s a battery-less flashlight that has a little hand pump on it, so I pump it to give it some juice. It’s dim, but it does the job. There are various sizes of cardboard boxes stacked up against a wall.

“More back here!” Cal yells back.

“Heard!” comes a reply.

But some of the boxes have little holes eaten through them on the bottom. Which isn’t surprising considering the small brown droppings and crumbs all over the back room. Mice or rats. Possibly squirrels. But the poor fox wasn’t able to get in. Maybe it just waited for all the other rodents to fatten themselves up before eating them. At least now with the door smashed open, they can have all the pantry-moth-eaten food their little heart desires.

There’s a rusty metal tread plate door in the middle of the back room next to a desk stacked with order forms and invoices. Cal leans down and pulls on the metal handle. The hinges squeal and rust flakes off.

A set of steep wooden stairs leads down to a damp-smelling basement. I look back at the boxes against the wall behind us. I don’t see why someone would carry heavy boxes down these basement stairs if they were using the back room as storage. And it’s not like this town has many options for “supermarkets,” so I’d assume the owner knew exactly what kind of food to order and how much per week.

Still, I follow as Cal leads the way.

The basement is pitch-black and the rotten scent gets stronger. I shiver at the familiar sweet, putrid smell. There’s something dead down here. My chest tightens, and I’d sprint back up the stairs if my legs could move, but they can’t. The light in my hand dims and blood pumps through my ears in a cacophonous whoosh.

“More light, Jamie,” Cal says. It shakes me from my paralysis, and I pump the light, trying to focus on that instead of on the dark around me. Or on the imaginary skeletons lurking in the dark, the people, the animals, or any other things that are waiting to scurry across my feet or graze the back of my neck.

I realize I’m still pumping the flashlight but it’s not getting any brighter.

Cal is looking at me. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Claustrophobic,” I say, which isn’t entirely a lie. I’m scared of the dark and claustrophobic. The dark is less of an issue when I’m outside, but even if I have to pee at night, I won’t go far from the fire. And if the fire is too low, I’ll hold it till morning.

“Let me distract you, then,” he says, turning back into the basement and waving away the spiderwebs refracting the LED light in the dark. “Do you think you’ll all come along with us tomorrow?”

That is a good distraction, actually. Because I want to vote no, but I’m not sure how Andrew will feel about it. Yes, these people have been helpful, and they seem trustworthy. If they’re not, I shouldn’t be following Cal into a dark basement in middle-of-nowhere Florida. But my plan is still to get Amy and Henri-Two back to Henri in Bethesda and then go to the cabin with Andrew, though I’m not sure he’ll leave everyone else. If we could convince them all to go with the Nomads, then maybe me, Cara, Andrew, Amy, and Henri-Two can continue on our own. It would be easier, just the four of us taking turns holding Henri-Two. We wouldn’t have to find as much food, stop as much, rest for as long.

And if we find antibiotics and food, we can prioritize ourselves. But I’ll be honest, I will miss a few of the others—specifically Daphne, Taylor, and the Kid.

I know it’s the best solution for us. I just don’t think Andrew will go for it.

“I’m not sure,” I say. And the distraction kind of works because now I’m not freaking out about the dark, I’m freaking out about Andrew and me and trying to figure out what’s next for us.

“Holy shit,” Cal says. I focus the flashlight to his right. There’s a ceiling-high shelf that goes all the way toward the front of the store, and on the left is another similar line of shelves, creating an aisle. They’re all filled with non-exploded canned food. The basement is damp and a lot cooler than upstairs. It must not have gotten as hot through the warm summer months.

Though I still don’t get why they’d stock shelves down here instead of keeping the cans in boxes in the back room.

Cal calls up the rickety stairs, “Hey! Get down here and turn on your flashlights!”

I’m checking out the cans on the shelves when the others come down, flicking on their lights. The extra light makes me feel a little more comforted. Everyone whoops in excitement and starts to load up their bags.

“Get a couple boxes we can fill and put in the truck,” Cal tells one of them. “We’ll take what we can today, then we’ll come back with the whole crew tomorrow and empty the place.”

If we split off from them, they’d come back without us. I put my bags down at the end of the row that’s toward the front of the store and start loading up. But the flashlight reflects off something metallic on the other side of the shelf. I shine the light in and see another room. More food maybe. But then that sweet, rotten smell reminds me there’s something else down here. A body or some animal that came down here and died.

My imagination runs wild with every possible thing that could be in that room. A rabid dog, foaming at the mouth and hiding in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to pounce. Thousands of rats cramped together and tangled into a giant, rotten rat king. A shallow eel pit that’s filled with cannibalistic eels hoping for something else to eat.

Around the corner is a small plywood wall with a makeshift pressboard door on old hinges. Slowly I pull it open, pointing my flashlight at the ground in case anything crawls out. But nothing does. When I step inside, the smell of rot grows much stronger.

I point the flashlight to my left and let out a startled cry.

The others call out to me, asking if I’m okay.

“Yeah.”

It’s no eel pit. There’s a metal cot in this room. The body on it has probably been dead for well over a year, and all that’s left is bone, dried tissue, and clothes. Cal appears in the doorway, along with the woman. She points the flashlight at the body, and I can see it’s curled up in the fetal position. There are dried, oily stains on the cot and basement floor next to some opened canned food.

A flu victim. They probably shut themselves down here as soon as they heard about the superflu, thinking they could ride it out as long as they didn’t have contact with anyone. But that clearly wasn’t the case. The way it infected people, it didn’t matter how secluded you were. If you weren’t immune, you got it.

“Jesus Christ.” Cal points the flashlight at the far wall. There are about nine military-style automatic rifles hung on the walls. All of them framing a dusty, weatherworn Nazi flag.

“Finally, we have proof of the flu doing something right in the world,” one of the Nomads says. “Adios, Nazi.”

It feels weird seeing a Nazi flag in person. And it doesn’t make my chest feel any less tight.

Though it does make me feel better about taking his food.

Under the flag is a wall-length built-in with drawers and cabinets. I go over to it, expecting to find Nazi memorabilia or the blueprints to the US Capitol, but instead it contains boxes and boxes of ammo for each of the guns on the wall. The cabinets in the center have more drawers, which house handguns in foam padding.

Cal joins me and takes a box of bullets for his handgun. There are a few boxes that have shells for the rifle I left back at the camp, so I take one of those, too.

Then Cal rips down the Nazi flag and tosses it into the corner.

“Come on,” he says. His voice has an icy edge to it now. “Let’s pack up some of the food. We can come back for more ammo and the guns.”

I nod, but even taking the rifle shells from that room feels weird. I try to push the thought away and go back to stocking the bags with canned food and freeze-dried MREs from the shelves.

Rocky Horror and Cara show up about fifteen minutes later, and by the time their bags are full like mine, they’re so heavy I have to leave one down by the steps while I carry the other two out front. Cal comes back with me to get the last bag.

“The settlement you left,” he says. “What made you leave them?”

I stop mid-reach for the bag at my feet. I don’t know how much I should tell him. Their group seems to have chosen him to be their leader—although he does discuss major decisions with the others. While we were in the mall, he listened to other people and took their thoughts into consideration. And when someone had better ideas, he stepped back and let them take over. Still, if the Nomads have a leader, it’s him.

And if we tell him the truth, that there’s a settlement out there that’s willing to pay for me, he might choose to turn me in. Or go back to his people and take a vote.

“The hurricane,” I say. “We were at a loss for supplies and thought the road would be better for us.”

“Why did the others follow you?” he asks. “Why hold you all at gunpoint and use up food and gas to come after you? And us when we drove past?”

It feels like he’s been waiting to ask this question since we met. I hate lying. Every time I do it, I feel awkward and stumble over my words. But this time when I do it, everything comes out easily. Because it’s not entirely a lie, it’s omission and avoidance.

“We’ve dealt with dangerous people like you have. Ours weren’t religious, but they wanted to control everyone anyway. They tried to kill me and my boyfriend, Andrew.”

“With the arm injury?”

“Yes.” I pull the bag up and shut the door.

“Why?”

I shrug. “Maybe they didn’t like who we are.” It feels like I should be telling Cal the truth, but that didn’t help us in the Keys. Still, there’s something trustworthy about him, like he wouldn’t turn against us if given the chance. I never thought that about the Keys, but I almost do about him.

Almost.

I stop as I reach for the door back into the market. “Can I ask you something?”

“Go for it.”

“What happened with your pastor? Is he still out there?”

His mood darkens more as he shakes his head. “No, he’s dead. His followers, the ones who didn’t fight us when we tried to take back the settlement, are probably out there somewhere. Or maybe not. Maybe they didn’t figure out how to survive without their pastor telling them how to live. And we were all starving by that point, so who knows if they found food and safety. But the rest of us stuck together.”

“How did he die?”

He looks at me like I should already know that, and I do, but I still want him to say it. “We killed him, Jamie. We knew how dangerous he was, so we took him out. Some people believe that makes him a martyr, but we knew we couldn’t survive as long as he was still around.”

“Did it make you feel bad? Killing him? Or do you feel better, I guess?”

And finally there’s something that crosses his face that I can’t read. Over the past few days of working with him and the other Nomads looking for supplies in the mall, I’ve learned how expressive Cal’s face is. The way his forehead wrinkles when he’s frustrated or thinking about something and the crow’s-feet around his eyes grow deeper, but this is something that I’ve never seen.

“There’s a lot in my life from the before times that sometimes keeps me up at night. Are you religious at all?”

“No.” My mom raised me with the most basic religious beliefs—mainly what she was raised with. But she was brought up Catholic and said she didn’t want to force me to think the same way. When I was seven, I asked why we didn’t go to church and her answer was simple: “Because I got sick of tithing my own money to a church that makes women take vows of poverty while the priest is driving around town in a brand-new Cadillac.” Through the years I’ve become more of a spiritual agnostic.

“How about some kind of higher power, everything happening for a reason?”

“What reason would justify killing off seven billion people in a matter of months? Not to mention those who’ve died in the fallout. The people who are sick or get injured in some kind of accident and don’t have doctors anymore. The Americans who are outnumbered by guns by about ten thousand to one now. Why does everything have to have a purpose? Why can’t the superflu just be a random oops, where that one patient-zero bird was supposed to fly into a window but didn’t? The universe was created by accident, so why can’t it end the same way?”

He laughs, and I realize how riled up that got me, though I’m not sure why. But he’s nodding. “Yeah, I guess you have a point. But maybe some of those random moments have reason. Like a universal convergence, where all the right moments happen at all the right points in time. And just for a split second, things make sense. The bird realizing at the last moment it was about to fly into a window. It doesn’t make sense to us because humans, and the bird, all died. But viruses are living things, too, so in that moment, everything converged to make it survive and spread.”

All this has gotten a little too cerebral for me. I’m sure Andrew wouldn’t mind having this conversation with Cal, but I don’t know how we got here from talking about his Christofascist settlement. I shrug. “Okay.”

“What I’m saying, Jamie, is not everything is going to make sense. And maybe not everything we do in life is something to feel good about, but sometimes—yes, even those maybe-random moments—things converge and it makes sense. But not for everyone.”

Like his fascist pastor’s death. It didn’t make sense for Pastor Phillip, but it made sense for everyone else here, still alive.

That’s how I was feeling after I shot Harvey Rosewood. There was guilt because I never wanted to hurt anyone. I never want to hurt anyone. But I would kill Harvey again if I needed to. To protect Andrew, I’d do it.

Over the past few months I’ve also thought about Danny Rosewood, and how his death would be the easiest thing for us. The more I thought about it, the easier that thought came. My stomach no longer turned; the guilt in my chest wasn’t there. The thought was like a splinter embedded too deep in my finger; the skin healed over it and it became a part of me.

“Pastor Phillip liked to use that Bible passage about the meek inheriting the earth. Could be, the meek outnumber the others. And maybe now, without the structure of society, we’re all learning how to fight back. If those random moments converge again—and honestly, it seems like with a smaller population left, it’s happening a whole lot more—there’s strength in numbers. Especially if the randomness of the world lets people like Pastor Phillip survive the flu. Or the people coming after you.”

I absolutely clock that he’s using the present tense. Maybe my gut is right, and he can be trusted. Still, he said there’s plenty for him to feel guilty about from the before times. Maybe it’s stupid stuff like shoplifting or lying to someone he loved. But it could be more.

“What do you still feel guilty about? From before, I mean.”

“Next universal convergence,” he says. “If you’re still with us, remind me to tell you.”

That doesn’t make me feel great. Cal pushes open the door to the back room, and I follow him out to the truck, hopping in next to Cara and Rocky Horror.

As we drive out of town, I see the gray fox again, lying low in the high grass on the side of the road. I feel Cara’s eyes on me and turn. She gives me an arched eyebrow, asking if I’m good, and I nod. But I can’t help but think about her family. How they all survived the superflu only to die in some mysterious fire she escaped. Maybe that was another random convergence. One that involved others who sought to hurt. Once we’re on the highway again, the wind is too loud to talk over, so I’m able to think about what Cal said.

We’re all learning how to fight back. And maybe that’s what we need to do. I’ll always fight for Andrew; we just need to find other people who are willing to fight for us, too.